RDDL Proposal from Tim Bray

> Here's the example.  There's a namespace whose name is 
> "http://example.com/L".  It has a RelaxNG schema at 
> "http://example.com/schemas/L.rng" with nature 
> "http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0" and purpose 
> "http://www.rddl.org/purposes#validation".  It has a CSS stylesheet at 
> "http://example.org/style/L.css" with nature 
> "http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/css" and 
> purpose "http://www.rddl.org/purposes#render".
> 
> Please propose examples

I'm surprised at the lack of response to date.  The amount of 
namespace-bearing XML in the world is increasing at a very high rate, 
and that rate will accelerate dramatically sometime next year with the 
release of MS Office 11.  I think it's important that we get some 
consensus as to what those namespace canusefully point at, to provide 
some interoperability in the marketplace.

So, here's my proposal.

Give up on XLink because this is not an end-user-oriented browsing 
application, and because using "role" and "arcrole" for Nature and 
Purpose is a kludge.

Give up on RDF because there is a poor match between RDDL's goals 
(dereference a URI and use the results to look up other URIs in based on 
nature & purpose) and RDF's goals (building an inference-capable network 
of assertions about everything).

I propose one new element <rddl:rr> for each related resource, embedded 
in XHTML as though it were in %Flow.mix, with attributes href, nature, 
purpose, title, id, and prose.

<html xmlns:rddl="http://www.rddl.org">
<head><title>The L namespace</title></head>
<body><h1>The L Namespace</h1>
<p>The name of the namespace is http://example.com/L.</p>
<rddl:rr href="/schemas/L.rng"
          title="RelaxNG Schema"
          nature="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
          purpose="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#validation" />
<rddl:rr href="/style/L.css"
          title="CSS Stylesheet"
          nature=
     "http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/css"
          purpose="http://www.rddl.org/purposes#render" />
</body>
</html>

Pro: easy for anyone to understand, parse, and generate.
Con: Isn't XLink so if a generic XLink processor existed, it wouldn't be 
able to use it.
Con: Isn't RDF, so not directly part of the Semantic Web (on the other 
hand, you could trivially generate any of the dozens of different 
RDDL/RDF proposals based on reading the above).

  -Tim

Received on Monday, 2 December 2002 20:13:17 UTC